Designing Suburban functioned as catharsis for its designer Rudy VanderLans. It was an opportunity to disprove some of the basic notions he had learned in design school regarding traditional type design. "My type design teacher would call Suburban a 'vermicelli' font," VanderLans says, "a typeface lacking the necessary visible contrast and stresses between counters and strokes and/or optical corrections to make it a 'successful' typeface. All valid notions, but by no means the only route to legibility and/or beautiful type."